If it’s troubling, it’s at least partly because it feels like Dolezal is adopting the culture without carrying the burdens. And with the fake father and the fake children, it seems like she’s deceiving people for the sake of an à la carte blackness, in which you take the best parts, and leave the pain aside.

SPOILER WARNING: This tab contains spoilers for last night’s Game of Thrones (plot details/events), and your day (existence of Jon Ronson).

In an advertorial in Vanity Fair, Twitter-shame-to-book-publicity engine Jon Ronson made the Walk of Atonement scene in last night’s Game of Thrones all about dot him.

After slotting Cersei Lannister’s punishment into a very lightly re-edited excerpt from his book about real-world judicially-mandated public shaming, he brings up Justine Sacco to highlight the similarities between her and Cersei. Ronson makes something of a habit of defending white women; only a few days ago he followed up his smarmy tweet with a GQ interview about Rachel Dolezal, adjudicating the public discourse like a spindly, faux-naive Roman emperor intervening to save the unjustly mocked.

Ronson trades in false equivalency, and his Thrones piece ignores… well, a lot, but most especially the gendered element to Cersei’s punishment, which removed sexual agency from a character who has explicitly stated that her beauty is the only power she has. To make the kind of comparisons he did indicates, once again, that Ronson has very little interest or insight in the different ways male and female bodies move in the world (or in Westeros).

Is Ronson not very bright (unlikely)? Is he being willfully obtuse (much more likely)? Is he a provocateur who is less interested in logic than book sales (DING DING DING)? These questions would take more time than an Intern has to fully answer. Perhaps the only person who could truly solve the Ronson riddle is Ronson himself. If only he weren’t prevented from looking inward by the law of his kind, lest he read his own name backward and be banished to his home dimension.

I know we have fun here on Tabs, but do you know what isn’t fun? Making fun of Jon Ronson. This kind of witch hunt, crusade, crucifixion, tearing-apart, literally rending limb from limb, and permanently injuring in a visceral, physical way by the actual fists and teeth of internet commenters that we’ve just seen is exactly the kind of thing handsome author Jon Ronson explores in his new book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” by Jon Ronson available now wherever books are sold. This is Rusty saying this, and not Jon Ronson, who would never break into Tabs headquarters in order to promote his new book (titled: “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” icymi). Nope.